Fourth Quarter — 1999-01-20

Median weekly earnings of the nation's 96.2 million full-time wage and salary workers were $541 in the fourth quarter of 1998, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. This was 5.9 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 1.5 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period. Data on usual earnings are collected as part of the Current Population Survey, a nationwide sample survey of households in which respondents are asked, among other things, how much each wage and salary worker usually earns. (See explanatory note.) Highlights from the fourth-quarter data are: ---Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $471 a week, or 76.7 percent of the $614 median for men. The female-male earnings ratios for blacks (84.2 percent) and for Hispanics (84.9 percent) were higher than for whites (75.7 percent).